Kevin Brolan joined the commercial team at Yellow Buses in 2019 and is responsible for producing roadside timetables for all bus stops in the operator’s network. 

To do this he uses OmniSTOPdesign – an Omnibus publishing software solution he describes as “brilliant, logical and easy to use”.

It takes Kevin half-an-hour to produce PDFs for all 800 stops; it was previously taking up to three weeks and involved full-time support from a graphic designer.  

The commercial assistant highlights four of his favourite OmniSTOPdesign features. 

Customisation

There are so many features of OmniSTOPdesign that are great, but the customisability is the top one for me; the options this feature provides are endless. From one master template, I can create eight, nine, 10 different templates and each one will be different and tailored to our needs. 

OmniSTOPdesign allows users to create templates to any paper size, with a large range of layouts to choose from, and full freedom over graphics and fonts. Printed material is tailored to meet company specific brand requirements. 

Route maps

I particularly love the route maps as well. We’re a tourist town that attracts visitors and students who need to make informed decisions on how to get to places and route maps by locality makes this very clear. 

OmniSTOPdesign templates can include an automatically generated line-of-route map for each service, showing which places are served by the service and how long it takes the bus to reach them from the current stop.

On-stop display imagery 

Another great feature is the ability to advertise our services such as Buster’s Beach Bus. We insert an image of the brand into the service line to point the customer to the beach bus and it will tie in with our calendars as well. It’s also useful when promoting services offered by our partner organisations. 

OmniSTOPdesign allows users to insert graphics in any format to enhance the displays; all services can have their own branding graphic shown alongside the service details as well as promotional messages for other services. 

One size fits all

We struggle with our roadside infrastructure where we have several services going to one place that we haven’t got the roadside material to fit it in. Again, this is where the customisability feature is so brilliant; we can force the times in by resizing the departure dates and departure. Without OmniSTOPdesign, we would have to use multiple cases on bus stops which would be confusing for the customer. 

OmniSTOPdesign allows all text elements to be customised using whatever fonts and font sizes the user requires for that particular text element. 

Kevin said it is important for Yellow Buses to provide clear information quickly to customers: “By using OmniSTOPdesign, we can do that easily. For us it ticks all the boxes.”